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Off on a Comet
Drawing by Paul Philippoteaux, engraving by Charles Laplante (fr), 1877
Off on a Comet (French: Hector Servadac) is an 1877 science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne. It recounts the journey of several people carried away by a comet contacting the Earth. The comet passes by various bodies in the Solar System before returning the travelers to the Earth.
John Herschel observes Comet Halley from his observatory in Cape Town in 1835 (illustration from the book).
The story starts with a comet called Gallia, that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. The disaster occurs on January 1 of the year 188x in the area around Gibraltar. On the territory that is carried away by the comet there remain a total of thirty-six people of French, English, Spanish and Russian nationality. These people do not realize at first what has happened, and consider the collision an earthquake.
They first notice weight loss: Captain Servadac's adjutant Ben Zoof, to his amazement, jumps 12m (39ft) high. Zoof with Servadac also soon notice that the alternation of day and night is shortened to six hours, that east and west have changed sides, and that water begins to boil at 66°C (151°F), from which they rightly deduce that the atmosphere became thinner and pressure dropped. At the beginning of their stay in Gallia they notice the Earth with the Moon, but think it is an unknown planet. Other important information is obtained through their research expedition with a ship, which the comet also took.
During the voyage they discover a mountain chain blocking the sea, which they initially consider to be the Mediterranean Sea and then they find the island of Formentera (before the catastrophe a part of the Balearic Islands), where they find French astronomer Palmyrin Rosette, who helps them to solve all the mysterious phenomena. They are all on a comet which Rosette discovered a year ago and predicted to be on a collision course with Earth, but no one believed the astronomer, because a layer of thick fog at the time prevented astronomical observations in other places.
A new research expedition determines the circumference of Gallia to be 2,320km (1,440mi). The mass of the comet is calculated by Rosette. He determines it at 209,346 billion tonnes. For the calculation he uses spring scales and forty 5-franc silver coins, the weight of which on earth equaled exactly 1kg (2.2lb). However, the owner of the scales, Isaac Hakkabut, has rigged the instrument, so the results have to be cut by a quarter.
The involuntary travelers through the Solar system do not have any hope for long-term colonization of their new world, because it is lacking arable land. They feed themselves mainly with the animals that were left on the chunk carried away by Gallia. One strange phenomenon they meet is that the sea on the comet does not freeze, even though the temperature drops below the freezing point (believed to be due to the theory that a stagnant water surface resists freezing longer than when rippled by wind). Once a stone is thrown into the sea, the sea freezes in a few moments. The ice is completely smooth and allows skating and sleigh sailing.
Despite the dire situation in which the castaways find themselves, old power disputes from Earth continue on Gallia, because the French and English officers consider themselves the representatives of their respective governments. The object of their interest is for example previously Spanish Ceuta, which has become an island on the comet and which both parties start to consider an unclaimed territory. Captain Servadac therefore attempts to occupy Ceuta, without success. It turns out that the island has been occupied by Englishmen, who maintain a connection to their base at Gibraltar through an optical telegraph.
Gallia gets to an extreme point of its orbit and begins its return to Earth. In early November Rossete's refined calculations show that there will be a new collision with the Earth, exactly two years after the first, again on January 1. Therefore, the idea is conceived of leaving the comet at collision time in a balloon. The proposal is approved and the castaways make a balloon out of the sails of their ship. In mid-December there is an earthquake, in which Gallia partially falls apart and loses a fragment, which probably kills all Englishmen in Ceuta and Gibraltar. When on January 1 there is again a contact between the atmospheres of Gallia and Earth, the space castaways leave in the balloon and land safely two kilometers from Mostaganem in Algeria.
Main characters
The 36 inhabitants of Gallia include a German Jew, an Italian, three Frenchmen, eight Russians, 10 Spaniards, and 13 British soldiers. The main characters are:
Captain Hector Servadac of the French Algerian army
Lt. Procope, the commander of Timascheff's yacht, Dobrina
Isaac Hakkabut, a stereotyped Jewish trader
Nina, a cheerful young Italian goatherd (girl).
Pablo, a Spanish boy
Colonel Heneage Finch Murphy and MajorSir John Temple Oliphant of Britain's Gibraltar garrison. In the French original Murphy is actually a Brigadier (General), a rank too high to be the butt of Verne's joking description as playing an interminable game of chess without a pawn being taken. The translator accordingly demoted him to the rank of Colonel, a rank less likely to cause offense.
Palmyrin Rosette, a French astronomer and discoverer of the comet and previously Servadac's teacher.
Publication history
The book was first published in France (Hetzel Edition, 1877).
The English translation by Ellen E. Frewer, was published in England by Sampson Low (November 1877), and the U.S. by Scribner Armstrong[1] with the title Hector Servadac; Or the Career of a Comet. The Frewer translation alters the text considerably with additions and emendations, paraphrases dialogue, and rearranges material, although the general thread of the story is followed. The translation was made from the serial version of the novel, published January to December 1877.
Verne had problems with this novel from the very beginning.[2] Originally he intended that Gallia would crash into the earth, killing everybody aboard. This may have been the motivation for naming the hero "Servadac" with the mirror of the French word cadavres ("corpses"), predicting all would die on the "return". His publisher Hetzel would not accept this however, given the large juvenile readership in his monthly magazine, and Verne was forced to graft an optimistic ending onto the story, allowing the inhabitants of Gallia to escape the crash in a balloon.
At the same time George Munro[3] in New York published an anonymous translation in a newspaper format as #43 of his Seaside Library books. This is the only literal translation containing all the dialogue and scientific discussions. Unfortunately the translation stops after Part II Chapter 10, and continues with the Frewer translation.
The same year a still different translation by Edward Roth was published in Philadelphia by Claxton, Remsen, and Heffelfinger[4] in two parts. Part I (October 1877) was entitled To the Sun and Part II (May 1878) Off on a Comet. This was reprinted in 1895 by David McKay.
Occasional reprints of these books were published around 1900 by Norman L. Munro, F.M. Lupton, Street&Smith, Hurst and Co., and Federal Book Co.
In 1911, Vincent Parke and Company[5] published a shortened version of the Frewer translation, omitting Part II, Chapter 3. Parke used the title Off on a Comet, and since that time the book has usually been referred to with that title instead of the correct one, Hector Servadac.
In 1926, the first two issues of Amazing Stories carried Off on a Comet in two parts.[6]
In 1960 Dover (New York) re-published the Roth translations, unabridged, as Space Novels by Jules Verne, including reproductions of the original engravings from the first French editions. In 1965 the I. O. Evans condensation of the Frewer translation was published in two volumes as Anomalous Phenomena and Homeward Bound by ARCO, UK and Associated Booksellers, US. University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, re-published the Frewer translation in 2000.[citation needed]
In September 2007, Solaris Books (U.K.) published Off on a Comet as an appendix to Splinter by Adam Roberts, as a slightly edited version of the Parke edition.[citation needed]
In a 2007 blog post on The Guardian, Adam Roberts reviewed one 1877 translation. Roberts felt that the translation was inaccurate and incomplete.[7] Roberts' criticism is, however, somewhat vindicated by the fact that the version of Hector Servadac he was criticizing was the corrupt version of the original Frewer translation found on Project Gutenberg (based on the Parke edition, above), which was made from a different French original than the one he was using.[citation needed]
In October 2007, Choptank Press published an on-line version of Munro's 1877 Hector Servadac, Travels and Adventures through the Solar System[8] edited by Norman Wolcott, followed (December 2007) by Hector Servadac: The Missing Ten Chapters from the Munro Translation[9] newly translated by Norman Wolcott and Christian Sánchez.[citation needed]
In 2008, the Choptank Press published a combined book version Hector Servadac: Travels and Adventures Through the Solar System containing: (I) An enlarged replica of Seaside Library edition #43 as published by George Munro, New York, 1877; (II)A typeset version of the same in large readable type; (III) A new translation of the last 10 chapters from the original French by Norman Wolcott and Christian Sanchez in the literal style of the remainder of the book; and (IV) 100 illustrations from the original publications enlarged to 8+1⁄2-by-11-inch (216mm ×279mm) format.[10]
The first appearance in French was in the serial magazine Magasin d'éducation et de récréation[fr], commencing on 1 January 1877 and ending on 15 December 1877. It was in June 1877 when chapter 18 appeared with the introduction and description of Isac Hakhabut:
He was a man of fifty years, who looked sixty. Small, weakly, with eyes bright and false, a busked nose, a yellowish beard and unkempt hair, large feet, hands long and hooked, he offered the well-known type of the German Jew, recognizable among all. This was the usurer with supple back-bone, flat-hearted, a clipper of coins and a skin-flint. Silver should attract such a being as the magnet attracts iron, and if this Shylock was allowed to pay himself from his debtor, he would certainly sell the flesh at retail. Besides, although a Jew originally, he made himself a Mahometan in Mahometan provinces, when his profit demanded it, and he would have been a pagan to gain more.
This prompted the chief rabbi of Paris, Zadoc Kahn, to write a letter to Hetzel, objecting that this material had no place in a magazine for young people. Hetzel and Verne co-signed a reply indicating they had no intention of offending anyone, and promising to make corrections in the next edition. However Verne left the salvage work to Hetzel, asking Hetzel at the end of the summer, "Have you arranged the affair of the Jews in Servadac?" The principal change was to replace "Jew" with "Isac" throughout, and to add "Christian countries" to those where Hakhabut plied his trade. The anti-semitic tone remained however, sales were lower than for other Verne books, and the American reprint houses saw little profit with only a single printing by George Munro in a newspaper format. Even the Hetzel revised version has never been translated into English, as both Victorian translations were made from the magazine version. This has caused some modern reviewers to unfairly criticize the early translators, assuming that they had inserted the anti-semitic material which Verne actually wrote.
A 1962 version of the novel was to have been filmed by American International Pictures but the film was never made. Various 1962 issues of Charlton Comics offered a contest where a winner would visit the set of the film.[11]
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is a classic science fiction adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne.
Captain Nemo is a character created by the French novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905). Nemo appears in two of Verne's science-fiction books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875). He also makes a brief appearance in a play written by Verne with the collaboration of Adolphe d'Ennery, Journey Through the Impossible (1882).
From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people — the Gun Club's president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet — in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Five years later, Verne wrote a sequel called Around the Moon.
Journey to the Center of the Earth, also translated with the variant titles A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and A Journey into the Interior of the Earth, is a classic science fiction novel by Jules Verne. It was first published in French in 1864, then reissued in 1867 in a revised and expanded edition. Professor Otto Lidenbrock is the tale's central figure, an eccentric German scientist who believes there are volcanic tubes that reach to the very center of the earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their Icelandic guide Hans rappel into Iceland's celebrated inactive volcano Snæfellsjökull, then contend with many dangers, including cave-ins, subpolar tornadoes, an underground ocean, and living prehistoric creatures from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. Eventually the three explorers are spewed back to the surface by an active volcano, Stromboli, located in southern Italy.
The Voyages extraordinaires is a collection or sequence of novels and short stories by the French writer Jules Verne.
Pierre-Jules Hetzel was a French editor and publisher celebrated for his extraordinarily lavishly illustrated editions of Jules Verne's novels, highly prized by collectors.
Mathias Sandorf is an 1885 adventure book by the French writer Jules Verne first serialized in Le Temps in 1885. It employs many of the devices that had served well in his earlier novels: islands, cryptograms, surprise revelations of identity, technically advanced hardware and a solitary figure bent on revenge. Verne planned Mathias Sandorf as the Mediterranean adventure of his series of novels called Voyages extraordinaires. He dedicated the novel to the memory of Alexandre Dumas.
Paris in the Twentieth Century is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne's future, when society places value only on business and technology.
Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South is the full title of the English translation of the novel written by the French science-fiction author Jules Verne, and centers on the story of James Burbank, an antislavery northerner living near Jacksonville, Florida, and Texar, a pro-slavery southerner who holds a vendetta against Burbank. Originally published in France in 1887, the book received a tepid reaction upon its release in the United States, partly because of Verne's inexpertise regarding some details of the American Civil War, and has since fallen into obscurity compared to many of Verne's other works.
Les Indes noires is a novel by the French writer Jules Verne, serialized in Le Temps in March and April 1877 and published immediately afterward by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The first UK edition was published in October 1877 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington as The Child of the Cavern, or Strange Doings Underground. Other English titles for the novel include Black Diamonds and The Underground City.
Two Years' Vacation is an adventure novel by Jules Verne, published in 1888. The story tells of the fortunes of a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island in the South Pacific, and of their struggles to overcome adversity. In his preface to the book, Verne explains that his goals were to create a Robinson Crusoe-like environment for children, and to show the world what the intelligence and bravery of a child were capable of when put to the test.
Dr. Ox's Experiment is a humorous science fiction short story by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1872. It describes an experiment by one Dr. Ox, and is inspired by the real or alleged effects of oxygen on living things.
Around the Moon, also translated as Circling the Moon and All Around the Moon, is the sequel to Jules Verne's 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. It is a science fiction tale which continues the trip to the Moon that was only begun in the first novel. Later English editions sometimes combined the two under the title From the Earth to the Moon and Around It.
"A Drama in Mexico" is a historical short story by Jules Verne, first published in July 1851 under the title "L'Amérique du Nord, études historiques: Les Premiers Navires de la marine mexicaine."
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras is an adventure novel by Jules Verne in two parts: The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice.
The Will of an Eccentric is a 1900 adventure novel written by Jules Verne based on the Game of the Goose.
Stephen William White was the secretary of the Northern Central Railway as well as a number of other Pennsylvanian railway companies until his retirement in 1910. Today, he is best known for his English translations of Jules Verne's novels in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph.
Splinter is a science fiction novel by the British writer Adam Roberts, published in 2007. It is based on an earlier story by the author, "Hector Servadac, fils", which was part of The Mammoth Book of Jules Verne Adventures. It is a reworking of Off on a Comet, an 1877 novel by Jules Verne. The hardcover edition of the novel is included in a slipcase with a hardcover edition of Off on a Comet.
Na kometě is a 1970 Czech film directed by Karel Zeman, based on Jules Verne's 1877 novel Off on a Comet.
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